Gone on a Gondola

It’s corny, and expensive, but we thought a ride in a gondola with a gondolier - wearing a striped top and one of those funny hats - was something we had to experience. We can’t be sure that we’ll ever see Venice again - maybe it will sink before we do; maybe the gigantic cruise ships will finally overwhelm it completely with tourists; maybe the Aussie dollar will sink against the Euro again and European travel will be prohibitively expensive once more - all of those possibilities persuaded us as much as the sheer romanticism of the concept of a ride in a gondola through the canals of Venice.
Our gondola was plush with velvet lining on the inside and sleek and black and decorated with golden horses on the water side and our heads were at ease reclining on the cushion’s velvet lining, as Edgar Alan Poe may have said if he’d ever been in Venice, which I doubt, but I digress..

Our gondolier wasn’t the most ebullient chap and he certainly didn’t sing to us but he did his gondoliering in an efficient and smooth manner and pointed out all the interesting things we glided past, like the birthplace of Marco Polo:

And Casanova’s house:

Casanova, of course, means “new house” and, as the Gondolier said, “He had many houses, a different one every night!”
It was fun to watch the passing traffic and see the quotidian life of Venice unfolding for the day:

And the Gondolier gave a sort of smile at the end; he wasn’t as handsome as the one Annette had encountered on our second day but he was a decent sort of chappie:

Transport in Venice is expensive unless you walk: a one-way ticket on a vaporetto, the cheapest boat - a bit like our smaller harbour ferries - costs 6.5 Euro per person, which is over $9 Aussie at the moment, and we didn’t bother with the water taxis, as we assumed they were much more pricey; and the gondola certainly isn’t a way to get around the place unless you’re a millionaire.
It was sad to think that our stay in Venice was coming to an end, because we’d both fallen in love with Venice - imagine: one of the most ravishingly beautiful cities in the world and it’s a city without cars!

Murano, where Venetian glass is made and more art and St Mark's at night

The hotel offers free trips to Murano, the island where Venetian glass is made, so we thought we should take a look. Of course, being slightly naive, it didn’t occur to us that one of the many glassmaking factories in Murano might have a deal with the hotel: they provide the means of advertising the offer to visit the factory and the free taxi boat to the island and, once you’re there, and given a quick tour of the factory (which is fascinating but brief), the “guide” starts trying to persuade you to buy at least one of the thousands of pieces on display. And, because the showroom is crammed full of glass and a reasonable proportion of it was to our taste - we love glass and pretend that we collect glass art (we have about 10 pieces altogether) - I started getting worried that the smooth salesman would actually persuade us to part with $1,000 or more! There are acres of gaudy chandeliers but still a mass of beautiful artworks and the salesman assured us that shipping to Australia was included in the price. I felt like blurting out “Look mate, we’re librarians for god’s sake!” as he pressed on with his unctuous charm. Just when things were looking desperate, we were saved by the American couple we’d made friends with on the water taxi ride to Murano. Larry and Melanie were a well-heeled, Republican couple from Laguna Beach, who have servants, a boat and another house in Mexico, but were even less inclined to buy any glass art than we were. They guided us out of the salesroom labyrinth and we discovered that Murano is a smaller version of Venice, with canals and piazzi and ponti and leaning towers. It’s a great place to walk around and there are hundreds of shops selling glass.

Glass-making factory in Murano

There are a lot of modernist glass sculptures in the streets and squares too.

The free visit to the island doesn’t include a return trip but we weren’t trapped as there is a vaporetto service going back to Venice proper, even stopping at “our” wharf, San Alvise.

A leaning tower in Murano


Murano is a 'little Venice'


Annette in Murano

We walked and walked ... and walked, in Venice, and each day and each night have almost melded in to one another. We walk all day, barely making it back to our hotel for a quick siesta and then walk to somewhere for dinner and then walk more and then stagger back home and collapse! We should be getting fitter each day with this incessant perambulation but it sometimes seems that we’re getting more and more tired, though I think that’s because each day and each night we walk even more than the day and night before! We have caught the vaporetti a few times, just to give our feet a rest. We stop for lunch and we sit of church steps and we look in shops and art galleries and churches and museums but more than anything else, we walk.

After the excursion to Murano we walked around the neighbourhood of our hotel, which is right next to the Ghetto Novo. Venice invented the word ghetto - it comes from the geti, which is the name of the area where the foundries were situated (and amazingly, there is a foundry right next to our hotel) which is where the Jews were obliged to live in the early days of Venice and there are still many Jewish people there, along with kosher butchers and synagogues. Our hotel is on the fringe of Venice proper, in the north and when we walk towards San Marco or the Grand Canal, we pass through many streets where local people predominate. It’s peaceful and charming and there are lots of children around, plus Venetians walking their dogs, of which there are many in Venice.

The Venetians are very stylish. They tend to be tall, slim, graceful and very fashionably dressed. You’ll often see men wearing elegant suits but often they’ll be wearing coloured trousers - red, yellow, lilac, and assorted other tints - with striped shirts, and almost all the men carry leather bags with long straps over their shoulders. We saw one guy with a striped lilac shirt, lilac trousers, two-toned shoes and his “handbag” or “manbag” or whatever. No Aussie men would have the nerve to wear what many Venetian men wear. The women are almost all impossibly stylish and elegant, slender with long legs. They’re all as stylish as Parisians but in a different, very-Italian way.

We walked to the Piazza San Marco on our second night and it was much more bearable than during the day, when the tourist crush was horrendous. You can get up close to the walls of the Basilica and the whole atmosphere is very relaxed and friendly and, of course, everywhere you look is spectacular!

The next day the Gallerie dell’ Accademia beckoned and it wasn't crowded! (Some of the greatest interiors in Venice, such as many of the churches, are surprisingly sparse of tourists). The Gallery has a fantastic collection of pre-19th century Italian art, the highlights being Giorgione’s La Tempesta, Veronese’s enormous 'The Feast in the House of Levi' (over 12 metres wide and 5.5 metres high!) and a marvellous collection of huge canvases by Tintoretto, including the astounding 'San Marco Salva un Saraceno' (St Mark freeing the slave).

Tintoretto - Il sogno di san Marco

Then it was on to the Peggy Guggenheim collection for some Modernism. It’s a small gallery situated in her Palazzo on the Grand Canal and there are some great Picassos, Dalis, Klees, Kandinskys and Pollocks, including a few of the paintings done just before he went completely abstract. The Grand Canal entrance to the Palazzo has a Calder sculpture whose modernism contrasts well with the antiquity of Venice itself.

Next post will include the gondola ride past the birthplace of Marco Polo and Casanova's house.

Ah, Venice!

Venice lives up to expectations - it’s beautiful and its beauty is very different to the beauty of Paris or London; it’s a more intimate beauty, more human in scale and so watery. Except for the water, everything is man-made, and the water is everywhere, though we’ve yet to see any of the high tides that sometimes submerge parts of Venice.

It’s hot too, but nothing like the 40+ degrees the city was still experiencing not that long ago. Venice is a testament to humanity’s ability to create beautiful things because there are no natural features except for the sea: no hills, no cliffs, no beaches and few trees; and yet it’s so lovely. It’s old and experienced and careworn but still lovely and it feels peaceful, especially in our area, Cannaregio, which is on the outskirts of Venice proper. As soon as we’d breakfasted we set off to explore and wandered along the canali until we saw signs pointing to either S Marco or Rialto; it didn’t matter to us because we were determined to see it all anyway. As we neared the Rialto, which is closer to our hotel than the Piazza de San Marco, the tourist hordes became thicker and the bridge itself was crowded with frantic snappers. Of course, we had to join in as well, we’re tourists too!

Ricky Rialto

Annette on the Rialto bridge




View from the Rialto

One of the wonderful things about Venice is that there are numerous churches, big and small, that you can duck into to escape the menacing throng, and you’ll find Titians and Tintorettos on the walls or in the altars. These churches are usually not crowded and often you’ll be the only person inside except for some non-evident staff. After a day and a half here, I’ve found more Tintorettos than Titians and many other less well-known Venetian painters as well.

We pressed on in the general direction of Piazza San Marco and when we arrived it was slightly disappointing, like a lot of “must-see” tourist destinations, though in this case only because it was just too crowded. In that sense, it’s very similar to Sagrada Familia and the Eiffel Tower (with the latter it doesn’t matter so much because the area around it is so immense). Still, it’s definitely a magnificent sight, with the Piazza, the Basilica and the Campanile tower. The Piazza San Marco is smaller than I imagined but I think the mass of camera-toting people must have diminished its grandeur. The queue to get inside the Basilica was much too long to even contemplate joining, so we spent only about 15 minutes in the Piazza itself and then went down to the edge of the Isola della Giudecca when it started raining, which dispersed the tourists somewhat. The rain only lasted minutes and then it was back to sun and heat and tourists.

We had fun watching the gondoliers in their decorated gondolas; it’s fascinating how they negotiate the narrow canali and the low ponti - they duck their heads under the bridge at the last possible second but do it with supreme nonchalance in typical Italian style. A gondola ride is expensive, around 100 euro, but Annette’s determined to experience it, which we will soon.

Gondolier waiting for customers






Gondolas on the Grand Canal


More f-----g gondolas (a la Monty Python)

We walked and walked. There are shops selling Venetian glass everywhere, almost every second shop it seems. We love glass art so it’s a buzz for us. There aren’t too many touts around and not that many beggars; as in Barcelona, most of the beggars are Gypsy women, who often sit in a position denoting absolute poverty and dejection, crouched on the ground near a church’s entry for instance, their heads nearby touching the ground and holding in their hands a crumpled paper cup for any coins passers-by may deign to drop in, though hardly anyone ever seems to. It’s very sad.

Santa Maria della Salute


The local residents are more blase about the beauty of La Serenissima


View from the steps of Santa Maria della Salute


Looking across the Grand Canal

We sat on the steps of the Church of Santa Maria della Salute, which has a huge dome and some great paintings and sculptures inside and then we pressed on, past the Peggy Guggenheim museum, over many more ponti and eventually back to our hotel for a brief freshen-up before setting off for dinner and a glass of wine at a local restaurant patronised mainly by Venetians and after that stroll through the stradi at nighttime, a very evocative and romantic experience.

Venice at dusk




The locals are friendly


Venice has at least two leaning towers!

That's one day - five more to go!